Text 11468, 94 rader
Skriven 2009-05-24 15:27:49 av Ross Sauer (1:123/789.0)
Ärende: CIA lies to congress
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Oh right, we should all believe everything the CIA says...

In 1973, CIA director Richard Helms deceived the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, refusing to acknowledge the role of the CIA in
overthrowing the elected government in Chile. Helms falsely testified
that the CIA had not passed money to the opposition movement in Chile,
and a grand jury was called to see if Helms should be indicted for
perjury.

In 1977, the Justice Department brought a lesser charge against Helms,
who pleaded nolo contendere; he was fined $2,000 and given a suspended
two-year prison sentence. Helms went from the courthouse to the CIA
where he was given a hero's welcome and a gift of $2,000 to cover the
fine. It was one of the saddest experiences in my 24 years at CIA.

In the new Ford administration, Secretary of State Kissinger, Secretary
of Defense Rumsfeld, and White House chief of staff Cheney orchestrated
phony intelligence for the Congress in order to get an endorsement for
covert arms shipments to anti-government forces in Angola.

The CIA lied to Senator Dick Clark, the chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, who was a critic of the Agency's illegal
collaborations with the government of South Africa against Angola and
Mozambique. Agency briefers exaggerated the classification of their
materials so that Senate and House members could not publicize this
information. Agency shields of secrecy and falsehood were extremely
effective.

In the 1980s, CIA director William Casey and his deputy, Bob Gates,
consistently lied to the congressional oversight committees about their
knowledge of Iran-contra. Senator Daniel Moynihan (D-NY) believed that
Casey and Gates were running a disinformation campaign against the
Senate intelligence committee. Casey even managed to alienate Senator
Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), a pro-intelligence, conservative senator who
typically walked through barbed wire for the CIA.

Gates' lies on Iran-contra led to the Senate intelligence committee's
unwillingness to vote him out of the committee in 1985, when he was
nominated to be CIA director by President Ronald Reagan. Gates was
nominated again in 1991 and this time he was confirmed, but not before
the hearings produced rhyme and verse on Gates' tailoring of
intelligence to fit the biases of Bill Casey.

Throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s, Aldrich Ames performed as the
most destructive traitor in the history of the CIA, but CIA directors
Gates, William Webster, and Jim Woolsey failed to inform the
congressional oversight committees of the serious counter-intelligence
problems that had been created.

In the late 1980s, the CIA concealed from the Congress that Saddam
Hussein was diverting U.S. farm credits through an Atlanta bank to pay
for nuclear technology and sophisticated weapons. The chairman of the
Senate and House intelligence committees, Senator Dennis DeConcini (D-
AZ) and Representative Dan Glickman (D-KS) respectively, were furious
with the deception tactics of CIA briefers.

The greatest CIA disinformation campaign in the congress took place in
2002-2003, when CIA director George Tenet and his deputy, John
McLaughlin, consistently lied about Iraqi training for al Qaeda members
on chemical and biological weapons as well as the existence of mobile
labs to manufacture such weapons.

Several days before the congressional vote on the authorization to use
force, CIA senior analyst Paul Pillar delivered an unclassified
memorandum to the Hill with a series of false charges about Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction. Pillar's memorandum and a national
intelligence estimate on the same subject were also used to develop
Secretary of State Colin Powell's address to the United Nations in
February 2003.

More recently, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), the ranking minority member
of the House intelligence committee, documented the dissembling of the
CIA to cover-up the Agency's involvement in a drug interdiction program
in Peru that led to the loss of innocent lives. Hoekstra accused CIA
director Tenet with misleading the Congress.

The CIA still has not addressed the serious procedural and institutional
problems that were exposed in a report from the Office of the Inspector
General on the Peru program, which concluded that Agency officials
deliberately misled Congress, the White House, and the Justice
Department.

In closing, Panetta emphasized that it was the CIA's task to "tell it
like it is, even if that's not what people always want to hear. Keep it
up. Our national security depends on it."

If only that were the case in the 1980s, when the CIA hid from the
congress the intelligence on the decline of the Soviet Union and the
Warsaw Pact or more recently when the CIA tailored intelligence on Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi ties to al Qaeda in order to give
the Bush administration an intelligence case to go to war.

--- Xnews/5.04.25
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